With England snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in the Hobart ODI last Friday, we felt a strange and unfathomable urge to go on to Twitter to write:
“A hopeless performance from England after having the game more or less won when Oz were 142/8. But we won the Ashes, so who cares?”
Like any other England cricket fan we always want England to win - especially against Australia, but we’d be surprised if any of our fellow England supporters would swap success in the Ashes series for winning the current seven match one day series or even the World Cup for that matter.
Indeed, BBC News would be a more appropriate sponsor for this particular series given that it always follows the Lord Mayor’s Show.
So, we were a bit surprised when SharanRP retweeted our comment, adding:
“Typical Eng mentality. Hence never going to be number 1 in either format”
Unsurprisingly, we don’t agree. Test cricket – and especially an Ashes series – will always take precedence over limited overs cricket in the eyes of the England team and English fans. There is nothing wrong in our view in saying that - a case of us not having our cake and eating it too.
The World Cup is important – even if the 2011 edition will see 42 warm-up matches before the main course of the quarter finals finally arrives – and England have improved markedly in the 50 over format in the last 18 months. Assuming that England safely negotiate their way to the quarter finals then they will only need to win three matches to win the trophy.
Given that the World Cup will be played on the sub-continent and given that the quarter finals don’t start until late-March, the run of defeats that the ODI side is currently experiencing in Australia has absolutely no bearing on how England will fare in the World Cup.
Indeed, if we had been in charge of selection, then the 13 players that successfully retained the Ashes would have been sent home after the Sydney Test to put their feet up and savour their triumph.
Perhaps we would have retained Paul Collingwood to lead a team of Lions for what is an utterly meaningless and overlong series – seven matches is at least two and probably four too many. It would have been more interesting to see how a young England side including the likes of Alex Hales, James Hildreth, Chris Woakes and Adil Rashid would have fared. Instead, we have seen key players like Swann, KP and Bresnan getting injured and others simply going through the motions or understandably losing their focus with the main prize already won.
In 2006-07, England won the Commonwealth Bank Series – with Collingwood playing a starring role – after being trounced in the Test series. Whilst in 2009, England put in another ‘after the Lord Mayor’s Show’ performance in the one-dayers that followed the regaining of the Ashes and lost 6-1.
We know what outcome we preferred. That doesn’t mean we or England have a negative mindset, it just means that like a Premier League manager who places league position and the Champions League above the Carling Cup, we know how to prioritise.
And who says that in the next 18 months, England cannot emerge as the number one team in either or even both formats? You may well be proved wrong there SharanRP!
Where next?
Reaction to England’s World Cup Squad – Prior the victor
What Cricket can learn from Football in staging a World Cup
Check out all our Reverse Sweep heroes and zeroes including amongst others Bob Willis, Dennis Lillee, Matthew Hayden, Paul Harris, Ijaz Butt and Kamran Akmal
Follow us on Twitter @thereversesweep
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